Best way to dispose of old laptop

Twiba

I have a few old laptops lying around. What is the best way to dispose of them?

Robisere

http://www.weeecharity.co.uk/

But make sure there is nothing personal left on the hard drives. Wipe them.

Carrot007

Robisere wrote: »

But make sure there is nothing personal left on the hard drives. Wipe them.

And no matter what the upcoming hammer brigade say. A single wipe of the entire drive (this takes time with these days, no not a quick format) will render everything unreadable to anyone without a couple of million to recover it. (probably more).

BigAl94

Remove and destroy hard drive - only guaranteed safe way

Twiba

Robisere wrote: »

But make sure there is nothing personal left on the hard drives. Wipe them.

Ah thanks! I knew there was a charity but wasn't sure what it was called.

John_Gray

The amount of time and effort required to wipe today's high-capacity hard drives is out of all proportion to their resultant value. This is even truer nowadays considering the price of the smaller-capacity much-faster Solid State Drives (SSDs).

I used to hang onto redundant hard drives for possible reuse, but I've just sent off about 30 to our local WEEE recycler for 'industrial shredding' (yes!). [This saves all that effort with a sledge-hammer, oxy-acetylene cutting torch, and other types of hard drive abuse, and the component metals and plastics are recovered.]

VWPolecat

There are really good fridge magnets inside old hard drives.

Undervalued

VWPolecat wrote: »

There are really good fridge magnets inside old hard drives.

Indeed.

If you have never taken one apart but have the appropriate tools then it is an instructive and fun thing to do!

Having done that you can destroy the actual disk platters although they are rather beautiful and sought after by some arts and crafts folk. Obviously they are the bit that actually holds the data although by now it would need some incredibly specialised facility to actually recover it.